Amen.
Not true, the future needs ‘enough food’ to feed those 2-3 billion extra people we’re gonna make. Organic agriculture (which ms. Sylvester practices, note she uses ‘farming’: she’s framing organic agriculture as something crafty and pure instead of industrial) needs more land (lower yields), so we’d need to cut down a whole lot of forest to accommodate this high income hobby. This is already the case with organic banana’s, as they cannot be sprayed with fungi- and pesticides when a plantation of organic bananas in infected with a serious problem, they cut down a bit of rain forest and start again.
What we really need is people, not just young, who are involved in agriculture and who can communicate that all food is actually real food and why we need to grow our food like we do.
I’ve stopped buying organic since I learned organic agriculture needs more land, has lower yields and basically is just a waste of resources.
In the past, when all agriculture was organic, a lot more people went hungry, and the risk of a plague or disease wiping out a whole crop was much bigger. We can actually reduce use of pesticides etc. by GM-ing crops, but this is also met with fear. How nice it would be to buy clothing made of GMO cotton which has not been sprayed with all kinds of things and didn’t need so much water when it was grown! How nice would it be if bananas would be resistant to fusarium fungus? Not only for us, but more so for the millions of people who rely almost solely on bananas for their existence? Are we just going to let them die because of fears of things that aren’t scary?
So, what we really need is to embrace the possibilities new techniques give us and we need to stop trying to relive a past that was never as good as we imagine it to be.
